It could be used to accelerate software transactional memory, though only for transactions with fairly small numbers of store instructions. That's the main relevance I can see. Oh, and it can also be used to make nice lock-free data structures (hash tables, etc.) and can sometimes be used by a clever compiler to automatically convert lock-based code into lock-free code, which is sometimes useful.

Anyway, I'm happy to see hardware transactional memory showing up, even in this rudimentary form. I hope that HTM becomes mainstream, because it is really a nice thing to have.